I met my first girlfriend through Windows 95: An Internet love story

Before everyone dated on the Internet, "pioneers" confused parents and peers alike.

Nearly 19 years ago, I said "I love you" to a girl, face-to-face, for the first time. It's a moment I remember clearly: Flowers. A ring. An awkward kiss. Both of our moms hovering around since each had driven us three hours to a halfway point.

It was weird like any early teenage romance, but this particular iteration of adolescent awkwardness remains unique even in retrospect.

My "I love you moment"—like any sense memories from my teenage years of 1996-98—mostly revolves around my bedroom. Here I hid from the feeling that I didn’t fit in at my high school, from feeling inferior to my siblings, from my parents’ dissolving marriage. And luckily I had quite the hiding place: a nook on the room’s far wall, sectioned off in such a way that the light from a single window, the sound from a nearby stereo, and the glow from an overweight CRT monitor filled the whole space.

The nook had a built-in desk that was perfect for the Pentium 166 computer our father had bought for the family earlier in the year. My older, sports-loving brother would barge in here on occasion to load a Tony La Russa baseball management simulator, but otherwise this was my largely uninterrupted personal space. Forget the sights, I can still hear my Pentium space: modern albums by The Chemical Brothers, REM, and local favorites The Toadies; dial-up tones—especially the rare, shrill interruption when a call-waiting beep or picked-up phone would interrupt a connection; and furious typing on a chunky, “quiet-type” keyboard, where I averaged the same 100 WPM rate I maintained with occasional Mavis Beacon CD-ROM lessons.

This I where I really remember her, Vivienne. Vivienne was the first girl my age to say she loved me, and she existed for a few months as little more than a voice, a few blurry photos, and seemingly endless pages of typed words. I was smitten, determined to meet her in person one day.

Almost two decades later, I wonder how often this kind of love story popped up around the United States in the mid-‘90s. Windows 95 was the icing on the home-computer cake, and the decade’s rise in affordable computing was met with a plummeting Internet learning curve. Web browsers were maturing, online services were exploding, and public interest was peaking.

And curious people, particularly younger people with time to spare, were finding ways to connect to each other in a way that will forever be specific to the era. Before the mid-‘90s explosion of dial-up ISPs, long-distance connections made through computers certainly existed but largely as fringe cases. By the year 2001, family Internet access had become more commonplace, and Internet communication protocols like ICQ and AIM became standard fare. Around the turn of the century, anecdotal evidence suggests it didn’t take long for American kids to depend on Internet methods for talking to local friends.

Enlarge/ (Editor's dramatization, this isn't young Sam with his Pentium 166...)

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But between those two personal computing eras, there we were, a scattershot assortment of other teens and me chatting through that weird, in-between growing-pains period. I’d always loved computers, but I didn’t grow up in a family where computing was prioritized—or understood—by my parents. The same could be said for most everybody else I eventually met this way. We chatroom denizens put just enough pieces of the puzzle together to find each other over the Internet, and nobody else in our respective cities—our parents, our teachers, or even our classmates—had done the same.

We felt like pioneers. We were the people learning about computers with little prior encouragement and without the help of things like hometown hacker clubs. Finding like-minded people across the country made us such technology converts that we did crazy stuff—like convincing our parents to drive us across the country so we could meet awkwardly in a motel parking lot. And the love in these late-'90s chatroom love stories—much like those in any other classic, misunderstood-teen saga—burned bright. This was paradise by the CRT monitor light.

Blood on the motherboard

My ‘80s upbringing didn’t include many cultural touchstones. Our family simply didn’t live anywhere long enough to set roots in a major community or religious organization (or, heck, even the Boy Scouts). Due to work promotions, my father had moved us three times by the time I was six years old, at which point we landed in the kind of Texas suburb that disappointed my elementary school penpals. The town had no cowboys or horses to speak of, nor did it really have southern drawls, visible gun-rights advocates, or most other Texan clichés. It did have many well-to-do doctor/lawyer/dentist families who held Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the highest of esteem, not to mention giant, affordable lots of land that, to this day, make me wonder if we’d moved to some sort of Poltergeist-style development.

Either way, our five years in that suburb ended after fourth grade. There was another move—and another move the following summer. The shake-up did no favors to my siblings or me, both scholastically and socially. Out of everyone, I struggled the most to fit in once we set roots in the Dallas-area municipality of Highland Park. (It’s as rich and conservative a place as I’ve ever lived, and you can learn more about it here.)

The short version is that I’d moved somewhere with a defined culture—one of wealth and deeply conservative values—and didn’t fit in. My outsider feeling lasted through most of my middle and high school career, and though I dealt with it by hiding with comics, video games, and books, I was also hungry to make friends. I’d always had the social-butterfly bug—I was the kid who would strike up conversations with strangers, much to my parents’ chagrin—but instead of racking up new friends, I just came off as an easy, uncool target and got picked on accordingly. (You know, chased around the locker room by bullies while I was in my underwear, that sorta thing.)

I also didn’t grow up with a home computer; my parents thought an NES and a “word processor” typewriter were plenty. As a result, I soon pretty much lived at my schools’ computer labs—especially at lunch, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with being the kid who sat alone. At the labs, I recall typing out BASIC programs from issues of 321 Contact, dabbling in early LAN computer games like Bolo, and teaching myself how every little menu and option in Windows and Mac OS worked.

For whatever reason, my father changed his computer tune in early 1996, at which point he went to a mom-and-pop computer shop to buy a custom-built Windows 95 machine for the family. Initially, he elected not to add a modem to the machine—'what did we really need that for?' he rhetorically asked.

I soon did what any kid would do in such a situation. Two months later, I went behind the family’s back and used my saved-up allowance to buy a 28.8k modem from a kid at school. His father had just upgraded to the breakneck speeds that 33.6k could deliver, so he fished out the old modem from his dad’s office and pocketed my $50. I alternated between reading the cryptic modem instructions and learning from my own trial-and-error to find the right jumper and BIOS settings—I’d once gotten a Sound Blaster to work with the computer game Jazz Jackrabbit, so I was qualified enough, I figured. Eventually, I installed the US Robotics modem without shorting out the entire system. (I did cut my hands navigating the crowded motherboard, however. I recall thinking of the blood as part of my computer initiation ritual.)

With an AOL free-trial CD-ROM, I confirmed that the modem could work and connect my computer to the World Wide Web... but not much else. Turns out you needed a credit card to cash in on AOL’s free dial-up Internet trials—same with Prodigy and Compuserve, too.

But I was determined to get online, even though I really didn’t have an answer to my father’s rhetorical question. What did I really need it for? Shit, I had no idea, but I’d seen screens and commercials hinting that the Internet was a portal to something new. I had a hunch that, like every other computer-related thing I’d ever used, I would love it. And as luck would have it, a clerk at the very oddly named shop near my school, Software At Cost Plus 10 Percent, had an idea: ever heard of beta testing?

Some new startup ISPs needed testers before they launched paid Internet service in the Dallas area, the clerk told me, and one service in particular had sent a rep to the store recently. He told me to come back a week later, and when I did, I found a stack of free beta-testing invites to why.net—a long-gone ISP whose remnants are still up at the Wayback Machine—along with instructions for how to connect to the service via Windows 95’s clunky internal dialer. I rushed home, made sure nobody was around to pick up the phone, and successfully dialed in.

Having gotten on-line in the 80's at 300 baud and run a BBS (where I had to modify the code in Z80 assembly language and recompile every time I needed to change something) this makes me feel incredibly old.

ASL? I remember those days. $400 AOL bills, mad parents, etched remembrance bracelets for Marianne. You must still be out there... Marianne? I never sent you your bracelet because I met Camden.

EDIT: And I was lying about the six pack. Sorry.

EDIT2: I composed my comment quickly, and that deprived it of all the memories that are flooding back. "What kind of musdik do you lkee?" A typo a friend and I laughed about for hours. ("what kind of muzz-dick do you lick-ee?")

Thanks for sharing, Sam. I am younger and growing up in a devlopping nation so internet access reached here alot slower. My first 'relationship' with a girl online was through MSN Messenger or whatever it was called back then in early 2000s. And then MMO hit, especially Ragnarok Online, introducing the whole generation to the virtual life. I swear a lot of ppl here logged in to RO just to chitchat. Fun times.

Having gotten on-line in the 80's at 300 baud and run a BBS (where I had to modify the code in Z80 assembly language and recompile every time I needed to change something) this makes me feel incredibly old.

Going through the snow, uphill both ways was really rough. Glad we now have Segways.

Ah the memories. Taking advantage of every freebie ISP trial disk, going on the hunt for blurry porn (and being subsequently blocked by not having a credit card!) spending countless hours in MUDs and message board forums.

The internet is certainly changed now, and in such massive ways as to almost be unrecognizable

I also met my first girlfriend, and my second girlfriend, and my eventual wife, online. I just found it much easier to relate to and talk with someone outside of my social circle and be myself when it was a person who hadn't already developed a sense and expectation of who my "self" was.

I'm sure it says something about me that I used to be more authentic with strangers than I could be with my friends. Luckily now I can just be authentic at all times.

First, Sam, thank you for sharing this story. I'm sure many of your users can identify a little of themselves in it. I think I was a generation behind so I did not feel quite so much the pioneer, though the whole thing about being the only one in the family interest in computers I do identify with.

I'm sure it says something about me that I used to be more authentic with strangers than I could be with my friends. Luckily now I can just be authentic at all times.

Maybe it's that you and the other person could focus on content without all the distraction of the customs and formalities one must go through when meeting in person? That's how I feel about being able to be open/honest with someone I would talk to online.

I have a similar story. For a while, my best friend in the world was a girl named Meg from Pennsylvania (I'm from FL) who I met in an AOL Punk,Ska & Hardcore chatroom. Her birthday was the day before mine which I think is what got us talking. Anyway, we chatted, emailed each other, called each other a couple of time (with a calling card) and even sent each other real letters via snail mail. I still have many of the emails she sent me and the letters and photos she mailed me. We talked about one day meeting IRL, but it never happened. We were Myspace friends for a bit but she was never online. A couple years ago I found her on Facebook and sent a friend request, but she never accepted. :-(

I first got online in elementary school in the mid 90's via the free dial-up e-mail service Juno. Quickly realizing that no one else had an e-mail and I wanted a way to talk to other people I convinced my parents to get us on a local ISP that I would later learn had a BBS.

Memories of chat rooms and MajorMUD flowing easily through a 56k modem -- until that computer had issues and I had to connect with the older 386 Win3.1 machine with 220000baud (i think) modem. That was an education in just how sweet 56k was.

I also remember using comic chat but I'm surprised there is no mention of how actually using the chat interface fell out of favor (in the circles I ran in, at least) -- because to those just using text chat mode you'd see all sorts of extra stuff coming through to communicate to the chat client what toon to render.

My pentium 120 is still sitting on my desk as a souvenir. I remember that one of the more popular chat programs back in the late 90s was 'Palace'. For all intents and purposes it was a pretty neat program that had a large community of followers. Around 2000 the 3D online community 'Cybertown' was started, but my Pentium couldn't handle the graphics and the lag was terrible.

By that sense I suppose I met people through Commodore and Unix back before there wasn't much on the internet. BBS chat only allowed the sysop and however many phone lines they could afford. Universities eventually did install chat apps on their VMS/Unix servers, as users with female names became inundated with "hey baby" messages. IRC came much later. I'm not sure if we were using "hashtags" as channels before IRC. By Windows 95, chat UI's settled into being dating apps used for hot cybers and steamy webcam chats and they still feel that way.

Wow, thanks for sharing this. It is never easy to lay out one of the most personal events of your life, but you described your experiences in a beautiful way. Having grown up in that era, there was something magical about the sounds of the dialup modem, the cranks and pops always made establishing the connection feel worthwhile and rewarding.

I think part of the charm of your story was that both of you were early adopters, there was less critical mass then to bring out that long tail of mediocracy. It's sad when you think about it, that we have gone from a benign online world of the mid 90s to what we have today, with sexting and all sorts of nut jobs on the prowl.

Oh wow... Oh wow... I first used the internet in 1991, and more seriosly from 1997 onwards. I didn't use chat rooms but was into MUD:s, text based multiplayer games kinda like World of Warcraft. From 1997 onwards, I mainly played this one MUD, and during the next couple of years, there were a bunch of us who formed a very tight relationship. We dominated the game for several years simply due to us understanding that Internet Friend is no Different from Real Life Friend (they even pooled together to buy and ship me a new computer because, well, the one I had was awful. Wonderful surprise).

But the reason this resonated with me was because of something a bit different. I had this relationship with a girl in our group. We were best friends, and an internet couple a couple of times (we living on different continents meant we couldn't meet, but we spoke on the phone several times). This part of the article:

Quote:

Vivienne had been sexually abused as a very young child, a fact her mother figured out a few years later—only to pretend like nothing happened. The issue wasn’t talked about at home, and therapy wasn’t taken seriously.

It hit too close to home. The girl who I was extremely close to told me after about... 5 years that when she was a kid (10 or so) she was raped by one of the nice well-mannered neighbourhood boys. This was through text though we'd talked on the phone a few times at that point.

She told me nobody believed her when she told the adults because he was such a nice boy. I swear, you can cry through text messages alone.

I'm not sure I have a point. Just... Machkovech's article resonated very deeply with me.

It's not just this article Machkovech, a lot of your others as well, and I mean no implied disrespect to your coworkers through omission, but you are an outstanding writer. Always really enjoy your stuff.

Great story, this was a very entertaining read. I was born in 1990, so I do remember life before the internet really took off, but this painted a very intimate and unique picture of teenage life in those days. Thanks for sharing!

I’d always had the social-butterfly bug—I was the kid who would strike up conversations with strangers, much to my parents’ chagrin—but instead of racking up new friends, I just came off as an easy, uncool target and got picked on accordingly. (You know, chased around the locker room by bullies while I was in my underwear, that sorta thing.)

Just for the record, this is the same Sam who at karaoke night at our yearly all-hands last month, got up and belted out "Poison" by Bell Biv DeVoe and wiggle-danced like a man born to it, while every single woman in the room screamed some variation of "I LOVE YOU". Clearly he is a person who has overcome his difficulties

I’d always had the social-butterfly bug—I was the kid who would strike up conversations with strangers, much to my parents’ chagrin—but instead of racking up new friends, I just came off as an easy, uncool target and got picked on accordingly. (You know, chased around the locker room by bullies while I was in my underwear, that sorta thing.)

Just for the record, this is the same Sam who at karaoke night at our yearly all-hands last month, got up and belted out "Poison" by Bell Biv DeVoe and wiggle-danced like a man born to it, while every single woman in the room screamed some variation of "I LOVE YOU". Clearly he is a person who has overcome his difficulties

I was "online" to a bulletin board system a decade earlier, eventually joining a bowling league in-the-flesh with the same people I had until then only known as characters on a screen. I still have the monogrammed bowling ball and shoes and bag that I got for the occasion, as well as a few of the league results sheets. I had a handicap of about 140, in case anyone cares (I don't, have hardly bowled since then).

Sometimes I wonder what would have been different had I been more involved in online social stuff back in the day, rather than just single player games and fantasizing about being the emperor of the universe. It's debatable whether my parents would have let me do that stuff if I had wanted to, though.

Oh man, the memories of IRC in the 90s...my internet romance happened around the same time, but I was a few years older and in college and had a job, so I didn't have the whole parental aspect to deal with, thankfully..If I wanted to drive or fly halfway across the country, I just did it! Assuming my car was in running shape and/or I had just enough spare cash for a cheap flight of course...for the rest of the time, IRC was our communication method of choice.

I think we met on some Time-Warner corporate proto-irc chat room dedicated to Babylon 5...she actually got paid $$$ to act as a chat room moderator! But she didn't actually know any of the commands to do anything, and somehow she ended up using me as guinea pig to test commands against....like accidentally banning me from the room, and not knowing how to let me back in..

We ended up migrating to DALnet or Undernet or one of those, and hung out in the Bab5 chat there, we both helped run the place....then branched off and helped found a small IRC network...holy crap its still around???? Its been like 15 years since I checked in on it! http://nightstar.net/

Anyhow, we got married, still together.

It was a pretty novel thing back then, people used to give us funny looks when we told them how we met. Not so much any more tho....but I totally agree with the author, its just not the same online these days...back then, we had the the college geeks, the SciFi adult geeks, the FedEx/KC-10 pilot, the single mothers, the odd highschooler, all in one place hanging out....basically, if you were competent enough to find your way online, onto IRC and into our chatroom, you had essentially passed your trial by fire and you were one of the crew, and you were welcome, and quickly a friend....it didn't matter who you were.

A good friend was hired by one of the fledgling dating sites in the 90's to do some research. Familiarizing herself with the site, she struck up a chat room conversation with a fellow in Canada. Three years later, he flew to California to meet in person. They celebrated their tenth anniversary last year.

My own long distance relationships--girls met at summer camp, etc--were turn-based rather than interactive. Snail mail, that is. I can still remember rushing home from school to check the mail for purple-inked envelopes.

That was a little pick-me-up for those of you complaining that AOL memories make you feel old

I got a random email with subtle jokes written by someone who obviously knew me. Turns out the school-friend of my older sister had a sister my age who I had met a few days earlier. She had sneakily figured out my email address and we struck up an intellectual and mildly flirty relationship online (and occasionally in person) that lasted until she left the country for a year.

Later on in college, I used to stay up late on the library computers chatting on AIM with my then-girlfriend (who was sitting next to me and doing her grad work) until they kicked us out at 2 AM.

These relationships still gives me the warm-fuzzies thinking about them...

Amateur. My IRC girlfriend is still my girlfriend, over 17 years later. Her parents drove her 1500 miles to meet me and a couple of my IRL friends who were also on IRC. Once she started college, I'd fly halfway across thr country to see her a few times a year. We've been living together a decade now. Christ, I'm getting old.

I also failed to mention a couple of years earlier I exchanged pics with a girl I met on AOL (couscous, of all the nicks to choose) by FAX, because who the hell had a scanner in 1993? No high AOL bills for me, though. I just got a new trial every time the old one expired. They didn't verify credit cards back then...

Having gotten on-line in the 80's at 300 baud and run a BBS (where I had to modify the code in Z80 assembly language and recompile every time I needed to change something) this makes me feel incredibly old.

I met my wife through the boring eHarmony. That said, I've meet a number of people online who I now know IRL. That said, my ex-fiancé and I ended things, because she basically became obsessed with a guy she had only met online and would spend hours on AIM and IRC chatting with him. Ahhh, college. Last I had checked a few years ago she never ended up meeting him, got married to some other guy eventually and did finally finish her degree. At a different college. 6 years late.

Le Internet has its ups and its downs for me.

One of the fondest memories I have of High School and "the internet" is I can actually still remember signing up for my first email address. Which I still use. Hotmail. It frankly sucks, but I have so much emotionally attached to that email, I still use it as my primary, other than family stuff (which gets the gmail treatment).

I'd been using computers for YEARS before that. Tons of online stuff even back in the early 90's when I was but a wee elementary schooler or middle schooler. Somehow I had never registered an email address before my Freshman year or high school, '97. I still remember sitting in the school library signing up for an account, because we needed one for a class project (HOLY HECK! Using computers in high school!).

Earlier this week made me sigh however. I was at my sons' back to school night and the principal was running through a PP on his Mac Book projected on to a pull down screen in the cafeteria. The school was built in 1927 and is the oldest in my county. I nudged my wife and remarked on how "you know, even in high school, they would have done this sort of thing with an overhead and transparencies. How things have changed". Lots of talk about how each grade level had a Twitter account and how "for some of the older parents here, this is what twitter is..."

Really? Really? I was barely out of college when Twitter became a thing. Facebook was my senior year of college. These barely out of college teachers are trying to tell me about...never mind, the mid 40's parent next to me didn't know what a "tweet" was.

I was on Quantum Link on my Commie 64 when I was 13-14. (late 1980s)My best friend and I would take turns at the keyboard, chatting in a HHGTTG chat room on QLink, and hit it off with a girl named "Trillian"After months of chatting we decided we needed to meet in person, so we hopped on our bikes and cycled 180km to see her. It took way longer than we expected, so we found ourselves knocking on her door at 2am, stinky and sunburned.

When she answered we realized very quickly that there was ONE thing we hadn't discussed during those months of chatting - our ages. She was late 30s/early40s and we were 14, lol! She was as shocked as we were!

Luckily, she invited us in, and after some embarrassing conversation we went to sleep on her pull-out sofa.

Met her husband and her daughter in the AM. Daughter was our age, so the trip actually ended up being pretty fun. Had a great weekend at their place, mostly hanging with Trillian's daughter and her circle of friends.

( The experience didn't turn us off online romance, thankfully. I met my wife on OKCupid, and have been happily married for 7 years now. )

I remember chatting up lots of other teens in FidoNet's TEEN echo, making friends with some who were semi-local and others who were hundreds of miles away. Taking some of those relationships offline to write letters and send pictures (as in, snail mail), interacting with people you couldn't see and rarely (and at great expense) heard.

Somewhere along the way I ended up moderating TEEN for a spell, before handing it off as my own real life started taking off and taking up more of my time.

I also remember chatting locally with people in my area, and having meetups at local restaurants. I remember the feeling of connecting real faces and voices to people with whom I'd only ever interacted with electronically before.

It's hard to explain to younger people today just how trusting it was possible to be back in the days of FidoNet and the pre dot com boom internet. Trolls and griefers were a lot rarer, and often less disruptive. Everyone that spent significant amounts of time online tended to be the folks that didn't fit in as well with others offline, so there was an underlying common bond of self-selecting yourself into the group. The online societies and landscapes tended towards being forgiving and guiding by default. Today it seems like finding a community that's positive is unusual. Today everyone's online, and many of your online friends are local peers that you see all the time.

What a great story! I really identify with you in not feeling like I fit in at my high school. I was a goodie-two-shoes too, a nerd who got picked on occasionally, and I mainly just tried to stay out of everyone's way. I was just beginning to discover computers at that time, though. While most of the rest of my peers were busy building social experiences, I was poking around the nooks and crannies of Windows 95 and downloading stuff from Napster by myself. Perhaps things would have turned out differently for me if I had found my way into the chat rooms.